The Success of Chapter 11: A Challenge to the Critics

Although Chapter 11 has served as a model for bankruptcy reform around the world, the conventional wisdom has been that it is characterized by a relatively low success rate and endless delay. The data from large samples of Chapter 11 cases filed in 1994 and 2002 demonstrate that this characterization is wrong. Nearly all troubled companies choose Chapter 11 over Chapter 7 liquidation, which means that the system serves a critical screening function to eliminate hopeless cases relatively quickly. Almost half the unsuccessful cases were jettisoned within six months and almost eighty percent were gone within a year. The cases that survive the early screening result in confirmed plans of reorganization around seventy percent of the time. The mistaken conventional view has not only skewed the academic debate, but also prompted changes to the statute in 2005 regarding small business reorganizations, changes that may have produced little benefit in reducing delay at the price of blocking many small business reorganizations of a sort that were succeeding prior to the amendments.